employment vs tenancy

It should be stressed that individuals who are employed or who own real property can be considered as tenant-lessee on agricultural land provided all the essential requisites or elements of tenancy relationship are established. They may not qualify to become beneficiaries or awardees, but certainly they can be agricultural lessees. Employment or owning realty does not ipso facto disqualify one from becoming an agricultural tenant-lessee.

Forum Shopping

The petition for judicial reconstitution and the application for administrative reconstitution in the Land Registration Authority addressed different situations and did not have identical bases. For forum shopping to exist, both actions must involve the same transaction, same essential facts and circumstances and must raise identical causes of action, subject matter and issues. A violation of the rule against forum shopping other than a willful and deliberate forum shopping did not authorize the [court] to dismiss the proceeding without motion and hearing. By its outright and undiscerning application of the sanction against forum shopping, the [court] plunged into an unwanted limbo the petitioner's and his co-owners' ownership of the realties. A modicum of care and discernment could have avoided such prejudicial result. We now put an end to such limbo by cautioning all judges to exercise care and discernment in their enforcement of the rule against forum shopping, that they may unduly trench on the valuable rights of litigants (IN RE: Reconstitution of TCTs and issuance of owners' duplicate CTCs in lieu of those lost, G.R. No. 156797, July 6, 2010).

Withdrawal of land valuation pending appeal

Under the CARP Law, landowners are entitled to withdraw the amount deposited in their behalf pending the final resolution of the case involving the final valuation of their property. Land Bank's argument that by allowing withdrawal of the incremental amount, the government may be placed at a losing end, citing the possibility that the recomputed amount may be more than the just compensable value of the [land] taken, is specious. Land Bank's lament about the impropriety of what amounts to the DARAB allowing execution pending appeal without requiring the [landowner] to post a bond does not persuade. To the DARAB, "there is no more ground more meritorious than the [landowners'] agony of waiting for a long period of time to have their properties valued" (LBP v. DARAB, et al, G.R. No. 183279. January 25, 2010).